Academic journal publishing is big business. More journals are popping up in almost every field especially with the open access movement dominating academic publishing. While editors of some high impact journals might reject papers outright, editors of most journals, especially open access journals, might be willing to send the paper out for peer review so long as it isn’t methodologically flawed (Arns, 2014). Some predatory open access journals likely provide far less scrutiny and may send seriously flawed or poorly written papers to reviewers – I can personally vouch for this happening for one open access journal in my field. With the rise of journals and the increased pressure for scientists to publish, the demand and strain on peer reviewers and the peer review system is growing.

There are certainly signs that peer review is placing demands on researchers. For example, my previous supervisor who is an expert in bioethics and health law once told me he receives a request to peer review an article every couple of days. Another researcher at Mt. Sinai Hospital at the University of Toronto in Canada mentioned that he receives 300 requests to review papers a year, each of which takes him 3-4 hours to complete (Diamandis, 2015). Many of my colleagues who are prolific researchers turn down peer reviews, trying to do only a few a year or pass it off to junior researchers. In a recent column of the journal Nature, Martijn Arns explains that the increased pressure to review and the reluctance of researchers to undertake peer review might mean that editors will assign papers to reviewers who might not have the appropriate expertise in a particular area. Peer reviewers who are not experts on the topic should not accept articles to review, or declare to editors what areas they can appropriately review. Certainly junior researchers or doctoral students may not be international experts on a topic, but junior researchers might do a better job of reviewing manuscripts by investing more time and giving fair consideration to an article. However, given the time involved and the sense of obligation to conduct peer review, some reviewers might cut corners and perform mediocre reviews.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

In a recent paper published in BMC Medical Ethics, my co-authors and I argued that there are unique issues in authorship in the context of global health research (GHR).Global health places priority on improving and ensuring equity in health worldwide. GHR is often multi/interdisciplinaryand involves large collaborative networks. Our analysis of authorship GHR applies to situations where researchers from high income countries (HICs) partner with those in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). First, let’s start by illustrating an example of a GHR research project. Let’s say that researchers wanted to study the genetics of a tropical disease. They wrote and succeeded in obtaining a U.S. National Institutes of Health funded grant. HIC researchers may bring to the collaboration scientific expertise, access to genomics/proteomic technologies, and may have been the main PI on the grant. LMIC researchers may be from a nation affected with the disease and can also provide scientific expertise, insight into local perceptions and realities, and access to the study population – the latter especially being difficult for HIC researchers given possible issues surrounding trust. Together, the team may gather epidemiological genetic data relevant to international public health interventions and also help address local needs and interests.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

Both parts I and II of this blog were originally published as a commentary in the Office of Research Integrity’s Newsletter (http://ori.hhs.gov/newsletters) Volume 22, Number 2, March 2014 and has been reproduced with permission for the AMBI blog.

In Part I, published last month, I discussed my experience organizing and developing a responsible conduct of research (RCR) workshop for stem cell scientists that was held at the Till and McCulloch Meeting in October 2013 as part of Canada’s Stem Cell Network at http://www.stemcellnetwork.ca. In Part 2, I discuss the importance of developing RCR pedagogy that includes both lecture and informational components, and provides ethical cases such that students have a rich understanding of normative, policy, and practical aspects to different RCR topics.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

By sharing a recent experience in which I delivered a lecture and case at a responsible conduct of research (RCR) workshop for biomedical science trainees, I will comment on why I believe that pedagogy on the RCR, specifically for biomedical scientists, needs two essential ingredients: delivering knowledge/information and providing case-based learning. The art is to determine how much of each element is needed and how to most effectively deliver information on an RCR topic and ensure trainees get the most from the ethical analysis of cases.

As part of Canada’s Stem Cell Network at http://www.stemcellnetwork.ca, I had the unique opportunity to organize and present an Ethics Workshop as part of the Network’s annual Till & McCulloch Meetings in October 2013. The workshop was a lecture followed by an interactive ethical case using “The Lab: Avoiding Research Misconduct” video hosted by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) athttps://ori.hhs.gov/thelab. The 50 to 60 workshop attendees were primarily master’s, doctoral, and post-doctoral trainees, and almost all were biomedical researchers working with stem cells. Most attendees had never heard of RCR. Thus, the goals of the workshop were modest and involved introducing attendees to the following: RCR, research misconduct (fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism), the RCR link to scientific retractions, issues of authorship and publication ethics, and Canada’s RCR framework.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

Last month, I discussed bias in academia and more specifically in the workplace. Just to recap, there are several studies that show bias in peer review and bias or favoritism in the workplace. Much of the bias may be unconscious or what is considered “hidden bias” and is not shown overtly. In this month’s blog, I propose three steps to reduce bias in the workplace.

The solutions proposed here are geared towards academic work environments at the departmental level in one of the three settings: 1) professors or research scientists running a lab or a research group who supervise research assistants, students, fellows and staff; 2) department directors/heads; and 3) members and chairs of committees charged with the selection of candidates for awards, prizes, and positions. While I am not applying these steps to the peer review of grants or publications, some of the points may be helpful to reduce bias in peer review processes.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

The Graduate Studies Program of AMC has provided education and training in research integrity and the responsible conduct of research (RCR) since the early 1990s. This program has been directed to graduate students in the basic sciences working toward masters and doctoral degrees and to post-doctoral fellows in the basic sciences. The impetus for initiation of such education and training was the mandate issued by the National Institutes of Health that required a description of activities related to instruction in RCR in institutional training grant applications. We will describe the initiation, development, evolution, and current status of our curriculum.

The individual training grant directors were responsible for the initial activities of this endeavor, which were sporadic, inconsistent, and undocumented. Subsequently, in 1994, the Dean of AMC charged the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, who happened to be me, with the task of developing a formal graduate course to address this mandate.

This task was initially addressed by identifying faculty who would develop and teach this course, create curriculum plans and objectives, and identify materials useful in teaching. This process also included self-education because this area had not been previously taught here. It also involved a good deal of public relations because most students and faculty resisted the implementation of training in RCR as an intrusion upon time that should be most profitably spent in the laboratory.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

One of my areas of research focus in bioethics is known as the responsible conduct of research (RCR) (a.k.a. research integrity). Research on research integrity covers a range of different norms and practices including authorship and publication ethics, research misconduct (fabrication, falsification and plagiarism), responsible mentorship, peer review, and RCR education among others. I have written on several of these topics in our AMBI blogs.

One of the topics I am interested in chatting about today is bias in the academic setting, but even more generally in the workplace. Much about research methodology aims to reduce or eliminate bias. For example, the experimental scientific method attempts to reduce bias by having proper controls, blinding researchers, and employing statistics so that we don’t over interpret our findings. Sociologists and other qualitative researchers may declare their biases when reporting research so the reader knows where the researcher is coming from. The entire concept of declaring conflicts of interest also aim to permit others to know what potential interest(s) the researcher may have which could bias their results. Moreover, the peer review process, which academia heavily relies on, aims to reduce bias in research. Peer review is not only used in the context of evaluating research, it also evaluates academic scholars for jobs, committee memberships, awards and scholarships, and other entitlements. One recent studydone by Drs. Daniele Fanelli and John Ioannidis showed the overestimation of effect sizes in behavioral research. Here the researchers performed a meta-analysis of meta-analyses (cleverly called meta meta-analysis) and found that researchers working in the behavioral, but not biomedical, sciences tended to exaggerate effects that were not supported by the data. Most interestingly, this exaggerated effect was heightened if the research had one or more US authors. While this sort of bias in the reporting of research may at first glance seem relatively benign, it actually has significant consequences because other researchers build on the results of previously published work and accumulatively, our social policies and clinical practices are based on evidence collected from such studies. Yet bias can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes in the academic and research context, some of which I think hits more personally to individual researchers.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

The scientific and medical potential of stem cells hold so much promise that progress in this area is widely followed with intense interest. Since pluripotent stem cells are able to differentiate into any cell type they hold the promise of leading to therapies for a wide variety of diseases and disabilities which cause human suffering and end lives prematurely. This field of research and development has attracted the efforts of large numbers of the most brilliant and talented biomedical researchers in the entire world. This raises the vexing question of why some of these brilliant and talented researchers are doing some very stupid things.

It seems like only yesterday (it was actually in 2004 and 2005) that Hwang Woo-Suk a renowned Korean veterinarian and researcher published the first reports in Science Magazine of the derivation of pluripotent stem cells from human embryos and subsequently the successful cloning of human embryonic stem cells. Hwang was a national hero. However these studies were recognized in 2006 as being the result of fraud. I remember wondering then, just as I am wondering now, how someone could risk all that they had earned by committing such blatant fraud. How could they not realize that misconduct in such important work would be discovered and punished. I do not get it.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

Since the discovery of human embryonic stem cells in 1998, many promises have been made by individuals and groups about the potential of stem cell research to revolutionize the practice of regenerative medicine. Yet to date, very little has been seen in terms of novel therapies in the clinic. Because of the substantive economic investments made in stem cell research in order to realize the promise they can offer, greater efforts to translate stem cell research into medicines has ensued. However, many factors might impede the clinical translation of stem cell research. In this blog, we briefly highlight the ethical and scientific issues surrounding the successful translation and commercialization of stem cell research.

The process of clinical translation begins with preclinical research using in vitro systems and animal models to show proof-of-principle and demonstrate safety and efficacy of a potential therapeutic. For example, if a stem cell is to be transplanted into a patient to treat a degenerative disease, then the type of stem cell that is being used must show that it can successfully treat a similar disease in animals prior to testing the product in humans. There are many reasons for using appropriate animal models that mimic human diseases: low cost, reproductive cycle, number of offspring, genetic similarity, similarity in the manifestation of the disease in humans, and ease of handling. However, there are many limitations to animal models that do not result in direct translation in humans, meaning what may work in animals may not at the end of the day be effective in people. While we choose animals as models to mimic human disease, the biology of animals is still significantly different than humans and thus may simply not translate 100%. This issue is difficult to get around.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.

Bioethics research is closely tied with policy. While discrepancies exist, I classify bioethics as an interdisciplinary field of study. As most interdisciplinary fields, one aim of bioethics is to develop practical solutions for real world problems in the biomedical and clinical sciences among other fields it impacts. Thus much of bioethics scholarship is closely intertwined and aims to inform health, social and science policy. Bioethics scholarship is also meaningful in attempting to raise awareness and educate researchers, practitioners, patients and the public on many areas of ethics in the health sciences. As a bioethics academic who has worked in both Canadian and U.S. institutions, I have enjoyed the benefit of examining policy and educational landscapes in both countries. Today, I want to specifically talk about research integrity policies, practices and education in Canada and compare it to the U.S.

What is research integrity?

Academics in every discipline including the fundamental and applied sciences (i.e., biomedical science, engineering), the social sciences, and humanities are self-governed professionals who conduct research upholding principles of research integrity. Research integrity (a.k.a. scientific integrity or the responsible conduct of research) captures a range of principles and practices governing ethical research. It includes practices such as research misconduct (commonly known as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism), authorship and publication ethics, peer review, mentoring, conflicts of interest, research involving animals and humans and social responsibility. Yet beyond outlining principles and practices, there is a growing field of research on research integrity where scholars try and improve our understanding of the normative and practical aspects of research integrity. I’ve written about different topics within research integrity including what is conceptual bioethics research? and peer review in previous AMBI blogs.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers a Master of Science in Bioethics, a Doctorate of Professional Studies in Bioethics, and Graduate Certificates in Clinical Ethics and Clinical Ethics Consultation. For more information on AMBI's online graduate programs, please visit our website.